Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Zack Beauchamp expresses understandable alarm at the failure to convict President Trump on Vox:

Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal is a warning sign that something has gone deeply wrong in our political system. It shows a kind of subtle corruption of the law that has, in other countries, led to the decline and fall of their democratic systems in their entirety.

Senate Republicans didn’t violate the Constitution’s rules for holding an impeachment trial. They adhered fairly reasonably to the letter of the law and can credibly claim they did all that was legally required of them. But this was a sham trial, one whose outcome was never seriously in doubt. By following the formal rules, Senate Republicans gave this fiction a veneer of formal legitimacy. All of them, with the brave exception of Mitt Romney, weaponized the letter of the law against its spirit.

This kind of corrupt legalism is a common practice among ruling parties in democracies that have fallen into autocracy. That these regimes contain the most direct parallels to what’s just happened in America makes clear the precise way in which our democracy is under attack. We should not fear a coup or seizure of authoritarian emergency powers, but a slow hollowing-out of our legal system to the point where the people no longer have meaningful control over their leaders.

First, let’s acknowledge that Zack and Vox are over on the left side of political spectrum; I doubt that any publications over on the right side, unless they of the NeverTrumper variety, would express similar sentiments.

But after that, let’s talk about political systems and what makes them likely to succeed or fail. It’s popular to talk about the structure of political systems, especially the American system, how the various parts balance and monitor each other, etc etc. Designing a stable political system is a fascinating theoretical exercise for a certain class of people. I’ve never really indulged, but I can feel the pull.

But often omitted from this discussion is people, the meat of the system, if you’ll permit a slightly disturbing expression. In my experience, a political system functions best when the vast majority of the citizenry believes both the letter and the spirit of the political system is best for them and gives them the best opportunity for prosperity.

But just as importantly, the deviance of those on the political ladder correlates with the malfunctioning of the political system in direct correlation with their height up that ladder. That is, the more important the political leader – say, Senator Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) – who views the current political system with little or no reverence, to borrow a term, the more that political system is likely to malfunction.

So I think Beauchamp is guilty of a slight error when he faults the political system. Honestly, and much to the dismay of a number of observers, theoreticians, and not a few software engineers, the system doesn’t matter if the people, up and down the ladder of power, are not behind it^[1].

And the evidence that an important class of political leaders, namely nearly the entire Republican Senate, as well as the Republican House membership, has lost their reverence for the political system, as set forth in the Constitution, is clear and apparent to the observer willing to put aside their prejudices. Only Representative Amash, who resigned from the GOP, and Senator Romney of Utah voted for impeachment and conviction, respectively, and made clear statements of how the actions of President Trump were wrong on a tremendous scale.

Their Party colleagues, when push came to shove, even admitted Trump’s activities were criminal, but with little to no explanation claimed they didn’t meet the bar of high crimes. They’ve lost their reverence for the political system they are sworn to uphold.

There is no legal punishment for this sort of mass failure of a political party; they can only be voted out of power by an outraged citizenry. We can only hope the Democrats are capable of ably communicating this meltdown in the Republicans to a citizenry that is very busy and highly distractable. We’ll find out in November. And if they’re not, then the citizenry will be getting what it deserves. Maybe a little more prosperity, but at the cost of their political freedom and a future of leading the world. The United States will become another failed experiment in the difficult art of governance.

¹ Which, not incidentally, is why nation-building doesn’t depend on the competency of the first nation in the process of “gifting” the second nation with democracy, but on the willingness of the populace of the second nation to espouse democracy.

I see that Mitt Romney is the only Republican Senator to vote for conviction today in the finale of President Trump’s impeachment trial. I heard part of his statement on the radio on the way home from work, and I thought it was honest and accurate – and should put the balance of the Republican Senators to shame.

And, yes, I’m disappointed that a few more of those Republican Senators, particularly Collins and Murkowski, didn’t join Romney in seeing the case and the evidence as being strong enough to vote for conviction. After all, the defensive wall of the Republicans has now become, Yes, he did bad things, but they’re not bad enough. From No he didn’t to I don’t care! is a long way to fall, isn’t it?

Yes, I know that I’ve said I think this is part of Pelosi’s November strategy, and that she will encourage the Democrats to wield this as a club against every Republican incumbent up for reelection next November – and every Republican challenger who clings to Trump like a lamprey to a fish. But it’s not as if Pelosi tricked the Republicans into this dishonorable position. Trump was neither forced nor enticed, but instead took positive steps into the land of political corruption. Pelosi, after due consideration, brought the inquiry, had her committees conduct them, and then had the articles passed.

The evidence was clear, even without the witnesses. The Republican Senators, as did the Republican Representatives before them, had every opportunity to behave with honor, to take governance seriously. They didn’t.

And that’s why I’m feeling down. It’s not that the conviction effort failed; I’ve known it would. It’s the failure of virtually all Republicans to clear the high bar of behavior that was thrown up to challenge them. Indeed, just about all of them seem to have stooped to make sure they didn’t touch the bar as they slipped under. That sad commentary on a once legitimate political party – which still enjoys an unwarranted amount of support in the citizenry – is what depresses me.

Romney, today, joins Amash as men who, while I may disagree with them on governmental matters, have my esteem for evaluating the President and his actions, finding them desperately wanting, and taking the strongest possible action to stem it. My hat is off to those two men.

Sheesh. This is just plain silly, and an indictment of the Republicans all on its lonesome:

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is running for reelection in Kentucky. So why is he running TV ads in Florida?

Like most everything in Republican politics, the answer has to do with one person: President Donald Trump.

With Trump planning to go to his Mar-a-Lago club for Super Bowl weekend, Massie, a four-term Kentucky congressman, is purchasing TV advertising time in South Florida on the president’s favorite channel, Fox News. Massie’s goal: Communicate to the president that his Republican primary challenger, attorney Todd McMurtry, is a “Trump hater.”

The libertarian-minded Massie has broken with Trump on an array of key issues, which McMurtry has highlighted repeatedly since launching his campaign earlier this month. But Massie’s new commercial aims to turn the tables on McMurtry, who is branding himself as a staunch Trump ally in lockstep with the president ahead of the May 19 primary. [Politico]

Well, how bad is it?

Telling the truth is dangerous to one’s career, apparently. If you’re Republican.

But it really goes further. An elided point is that we’re now substituting fealty to Trump, as Politico puts it, for positions and competency. Just about any voter knows that candidates have positions, while long-time readers know that, in my view, competency in office is an important part of any candidate’s resume, a facet that is in danger of extinction within the toxic team politics of the Republican Party.

In other words, it hardly matters how much you’ve fouled up your life prior to your run for office. Swear fealty to Trump in sufficiently towering terms and that’s apparently good enough to get you into office, at least for the Republican Party base, just so long as you haven’t spat on Trump – or are really willing to, uh, abase yourself. Even if you’ve advocated for abortion rights, don’t despair: Trump was once in favor of abortion rights, and probably still is, if truth were to be told.

But truth hardly ever passes his lips, does it?

Over the last few days, the rate at which deaths are occurring as the Wuhan coronavirus spreads has increased, but not by a great deal, with 426 dead as of this writing, but an infection count of 20,500+ – the vast majority in China. We’re also not seeing reports of young, fundamentally healthy people dying, so that’s another red flag that remains conspicuous by its absence.

However, this WaPo report is interesting:

The new cornovirus outbreak appears to be growing exponentially at its epicenter in Wuhan, China, according to scientists, who cautioned that only limited modeling is possible with current data.

This doesn’t mean an increase in deaths and death rates is in our future, though, as the article points out. It’s possible that it’ll only kill the vulnerable, and just be another infection for the rest of us.

I wonder how this decision will go over with the Pakistanis:

Pakistan announced Sunday that it will not evacuate hundreds of Pakistani students from Wuhan, China, despite desperate appeals to bring them home.

Pakistan’s ambassador to China, Naghmana Hashmi, told local television outlet Geo News that the decision was made because Pakistan lacks the medical facilities needed to treat anyone who contracts the virus and, ultimately, to contain its spread.

About 800 Pakistani students in Wuhan are registered with the embassy, and four are confirmed to have the virus, Hashmi said.

Hannah Ritchie of Our World In Data has published a chart illustrating where carbon costs of food production are highest, based on food type:

As it says in small print on the right side, just above the Beef line, “Transport emissions are very small for most food products.” In fact, once the food is off the farm, carbon costs drop:

I see the GOP is gnashing its teeth for revenge:

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst warned Sunday that Republicans could immediately push to impeach Joe Biden over his work in Ukraine as vice president if he wins the White House.

“I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened,” Ernst said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.’” [Bloomberg]

Skipping over all the GOP arguments about impeachment being weaponized, hypocrisy, etc., if the scenario comes up, I suggest that Speaker Pelosi, assuming the Democrats retain the House, grant them their request – give them their impeachment inquiry.

See, the Republicans have clearly lost their way. They’re desperate to be seen as legit, and that’s by making the Democrats seem just as dirty and incompetent as themselves.

And if the Democrats stomp them without an inquiry on the question of whether or not Biden should be impeached, then they can squeal about how they never got a chance to prove their case.

If the Democrats sweetly smile and give them an impeachment inquiry, then we can all be sure that Biden was not acting on his son’s behalf, but rather on the behalf of the Western nations and their drive to rid Ukraine of corruption.

An inquiry stains nothing. Secretary of State Clinton has been investigated enough times that we can feel fairly confident she’s free of any scandals, no matter how much Trump howls about her. She beat him and he knows it – he won by a quirk of electoral politics.

And we can watch the Republican third-raters twist in the wind some more if they want to start digging around on Biden.

He still had a pipe, so he wasn’t at the bottom.

When the mighty have fallen right into the city dump, at least those searching for a new butler, and having the luck to search the city dump, are likely to find someone who knows the position from their side, which is to say: what to expect. So goes My Man Godfrey (1936), where a dryly witty Godfrey finds his address is now the city dump, where he’s known as ‘Duke’ to his fellows, and pokes around the piles of debris in hopes of finding something to sell.

We open on the night of a scavenger hunt, a high society competition to find things, and this night one of the goals is a ‘forgotten man.’ Cornelia and her younger sitter, Irene, arrive at the dump and Cornelia sets upon Godfrey, who takes offense at this rather cold use of a man down on his luck. Cornelia huffs off, giving Irene the opportunity to express remorse, upon which Godfrey relents.

When they arrive at the headquarters of the competition, Irene wins with her ‘forgotten man,’ and ends up offering him a job as butler. Godfrey shows up the next morning, meeting Molly, the long-time maid, who expresses no surprise at the new butler, stating there’s a new butler everyday. Such is an intimation of what’s to come.

Soon, we know why: the mother’s a nutcase, Cornelia a sadistic witch, Irene’s encased in her own little world where Godfrey has fallen in love with her, Carlos is the mother’s protege, and the father worries how to support his high society family. Godfrey displays unexpected talent in navigating treacherous waters, dealing with Irene’s pouting, Cornelia’s baiting, and the mother’s apparent infatuation, or whatever it is, with Carlos. He even manages to get Irene to become engaged to a startled young man, who, if he hasn’t had too much at the party, will soon have had too much of Irene.

But a spot of trouble emerges when a gentleman shows up and recognizes Godfrey. This is Cornelia’s opportunity, and she takes advantage in trying to pry Godfrey’s big secret out of him. In a fit of pique at his unwillingness to deal, she hides a string of pearls in Godfrey’s room, and when Godfrey drunkenly stumbles home, calls the police to report the missing pearls.

But the police never find them.

Soon, however, the father’s worries prove all too true, as this is the middle of what would later be known as the Great Depression, and one day he comes home, kicks Carlos out, and sits his family for a talk that will include their possible future home: the city dump.

And then Godfrey comes sailing in, resignation letter in one hand and pearls in the other.

Witty, conscious, quick-paced, and fun, it’s a fine example of the misplaced man or woman story, of finding a new role in society and, through it, gaining a new understanding of that society and how it pettily fails those who have fallen on hard times.

While it’s not earth-shattering, it’s fun with a serious undercurrent to it. The actors know how to deliver, and, while I seriously disagreed with the ending and felt that the maid, Molly, was underutilized, it was still good for quite a few laughs.

This book took me about three years to read, and I had to start over. While I didn’t exactly have expectations when I bought it, beyond whatever review I read that convinced me to purchase it, author Deyan Sudjic’s style was unexpected and unsettling. He writes in a passive voice, and he writes in rapid-fire stories. There’s little attempt to formalize a language for describing cities; he’s far more interested in the commonalities of stories across the world pertaining to cities, how they succeed, fail, wax and wane and wax.

As an example of his style, Chapter 1, What is a City, is on page 2 quoting Walt Whitman:

City of the sea! …
City of wharves and stores! city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!

Whitman’s first two lines are missing. They reflect an even more important measure of urbanity:

City of the world! (for all races are here;
All the lands of the earth make contributions here)

Clearly, we’re not discussing critical population densities. Sudjic explores historical and contemporary ideas concerning the differentiation of cities and other instances of gathered human habitations; metrics of success; patterns throughout history; etc. He establishes an almost stream-of-consciousness style which can disturb the fussy reader, thus my need to stop, wait, and restart from the beginning.

Chapter 2, How To Make A City, begins with a name: a refugee camp usually has no name, implying its hopefully transient nature; a city has a name, which may mean something, and a history; a slum is somewhere in between, a possibility with no guarantees. Sudjic uses the name as an instrument for exploring the various histories of cities, from St. Petersburg to Istanbul, Ankara to Soweto. The monuments erected in a city are explored, and then on to the resources available to a city, such as  the people, river, sea, or ocean which helps define its commerce; political advantages, such as being a capitol city, are also discussed. Languages and immigrants and mixed people get their due. Streets, the various views of them by architects and inhabitants; Brasilia of Brazil comes in for a particularly vicious swat upside the head for its omission of street corners, salubrious for chance encounters vital to city life. And how streets contribute to successful navigation, or not, is also important.

Chapter 3, How To Change A City, traces how several cities have been changed by chance and by plan, concentrating on several. London comes in for an examination, due to its historical preeminence, followed by its fading in the latter half of the 20th century, and its regeneration as the political elites who sought to preserve the fading glory were undermined and thrown out in favor of commercial concerns.

By © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The Government of Cities is Chapter 4, begins with Walt Disney and his desire to regulate how cities were run, which leads to Robert Moses, unofficial dictator planner of New York for many years, and onwards to Haussmann of Napoleon III’s era. It explores the various options used throughout history, how they impact the health of cities. He mentions even the artist Lorenzetti of Siena, whose mural The Allegory of Good And Bad Government is to the right (partial), symbolizing how government can affect the city for good or bad.

Chapter 5, The Idea of a City, begins with Charles Dickens and the Marxist Friedrich Engels, and their horror at the conditions to be found in London in the mid-1800s. Engels noticed that the wealthy no longer lived in the city, they were now suburbanites, at least in Manchester, while the working class stayed in the city. It marked a new way to imagine cities. Add in the epidemics which poisoned the imagination of architects, and Sudjic is tracing how cities change in response to the critiques of observers, the dangers of living so close together without benefit of effective medicines, and the imaginations of architects seeing, perhaps for the first time, how bad a city can become as its infrastructure is overwhelmed by unforeseen populations. From there he traces the evolution of cities to today’s corporate campuses in cities from Cupertino to Pune.

The final chapter is Crowds and Their Discontents, and covers how crowds can abruptly turn vicious, or be a force for good; how sheer numbers can ruin the monuments and attractions of a city.

Like Pompeii.
Image: True Brick Ovens.

There’s no real conclusion to this book, and none really seems needed. Just like a city, a conclusion is neither wanted nor needed; it just goes on and on, until it suffers catastrophe, with no one left to write about its last days.

Today was the last day of the exhibit of snow sculptures for the St. Paul Winter Carnival, and it was a bit … warm. This was apparently supposed to be a ram’s skull. I’ll bet it was impressive before the warm weather had its way with it.

But I suppose it could have been an impressive moment when it lost its integrity.

The tonsillectomy was hellacious. No sedatives.

It’s amateur hour with The VelociPedal.

VelociPater.

VelociPatter.

VelociPlaster.

No, no, no. VelociPasta.

That ain’t right, either.

The VelociPastor (2017). Oh, yes, that’s it. Ooooooh, was that it. Clawed my eyes out, right? They must have borrowed a costume from this race:

It’s supposed to be funny, but we were watching in a sort of horrified fascination, wondering just how much worse it was going to get.

It did. A clumsy non-velociraptor velociraptor vs a ninja squad. Awwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeawwwwwwweeee.

And that’s all I want to say, or remember, of this one.

In the thread of meaningless logic used in the service of theology (last one here), we may add this proposed law for Indiana, known as HOUSE BILL No. 1089:

Synopsis: Protection of life. Repeals the statutes authorizing and regulating abortion. Finds that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm. Asserts a compelling state interest in protecting human physical life from the moment that human physical life begins. Provides that court decisions to enjoin the law are void. Specifies the duty of Indiana officials to enforce the law. Specifies that federal officials attempting to enforce contrary court orders against Indiana officials enforcing the law shall be subject to arrest by Indiana law enforcement. Redefines “human being” for purposes of the criminal code to conform to the finding that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm. Makes other conforming changes.

It’s quite the bill, isn’t it, rather childishly suggesting that Federal agents and members of the judiciary who find against it will be arrested – this is someone who just can’t tolerate opposing views. The author is Indiana State Legislature Representative Curt Nisly (R-22IN), who, according to Ballotpedia, asserted in his 2014 campaign for office:

Life begins at conception and lasts until one’s natural death. Life is one of the unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Taking the innocent life of another denies this fundamental right.

It’s convenient – for him – that he registers life as beginning at egg fertilization (while hiding behind some supposed “finding”). He avoids the “Monty Python Conundrum” of what to do with masturbators, eggs that are never fertilized, and gentlemen who inadvertently have what was called in my youth night emissions, through careful choice of a demarcation point.

While he may think he’s being clever, it actually raises the question of why unfertilized eggs and sperm, as the necessary ingredients to life, are not similarly considered sacred and protected. Without them, there would be no life. That certainly puts them in a special category, doesn’t it?

If you accept a merely fertilized egg is, somehow, alive.

Unfortunately for him, human life is characterized by independent motility and intelligence, as well as a primary independence, and while we can use these to characterize an infant as not human life,  the objection is nothing more than wistful: it’s a rare mother who’ll actually discard an infant – we’re not wired for it. The objection would require a vivid imagination.

Quite simply, we have not evolved enough English words to describe the situation. We have death, we have life, then we have that length of time when Mom is pregnant – but that specifies the mother, not the entity inside. It’s not capable of surviving without medical help outside of the womb, so it’s not alive by the above standards, but it has potential to reach it, if its DNA is a good enough interpretation of the two contributions, if nutrition is good, if not to many allergies are developed during the pregnancy, if the mother isn’t killed in some sort of horrid accident – such as violating Indiana theological law. And then we don’t seem to have a term for sperm and eggs which captures its special qualities. Or maybe we do. Lunch sits heavily in me, and my cleverness isn’t what it should be.

In the end, the longer we remain entangled in the irrationalities of theology, formal or informal, the longer these arguments will continue. It would be far better if we sat down, as members of a secular and rational society, and asked, in practical terms, Why is murder forbidden in our society (I suggest the societal instabilities brought on by the sudden and intentional deaths of its members will lead to society’s termination, or at least stagnation), and then ask how abortion could lead to the same, especially in the face of 25-50% of pregnancies already ending in miscarriages, without apparent damage to society.

Or, we can use my previously suggested solution:

Since we’re currently in the domain of someone who believes their theology should be law, that lets us place God at the scene of the crime.

Yep, that’s right. If you have God, then God must have planned the whole thing, right? So the old saying goes, at least: God has a plan for everything. God Is Responsible, since miscarriages are, by definition, not induced by humans.

I’m a reasonable person, or at least that’s part of my personal set of delusions, and so I realize that imprisoning a divine, all-powerful being could only occur if he, A) permits it, and B) can be found.

Neither condition seems likely to be fulfilled.

Similar arguments apply to the imposition of fines on the divine being.

Therefore, in order to discourage God from committing crimes in the State of Ohio, I recommend finding his or her or its ordained representatives and imposing appropriate penalties on them. Now, I recognize that, because there are multiple sects involved in the worship of said creature, it’s actually difficult to ascertain which one, if any, is the duly authorized and recognized (by it) representative, in the body of the leader of the sect, and which are merely well-meaning but deluded, psychopaths with agendas, or indolent parasites, nor is it the role of a secular state to make that determination.

But I will not throw my hands up in the air at this conundrum! Instead, let me supply a convenient answer which side-steps the intellectually obstinate theological questions raised above, and that is this:

Let the author of this delusionary segment of the bill be identified; from there, their sect & church may be further identified; and let the fines for the involuntary miscarriages be levied against that sect and its adherents, no matter how large or how small. Let’s be generous to God and impose no more nor less than $5000 per miscarriage. Furthermore, if that sect should disband for any reason, then the section on ectopic pregnancy shall be null and void.

Does this sound like madness? I am a practicing software engineer, logic is my everyday business. I’m simply practicing a bit of logic here. So, if this sounds like madness, perhaps we should go back to the assumption that a fertilized egg is somehow a person, and re-think what I consider to be a specious, and even malignant, assumption.

These daft proposed laws should surely signal there’s something wrong with their foundational assumptions, not with a society which sails along merrily without those laws in place.

And that off-the-cuff observation, now that I’ve reread it, may be the best argument against this whole “life starts at conception” brief.

Prescient:

1. divine omniscience
2. human anticipation of the course of events : FORESIGHT [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in the second part of Andrew Sullivan’s tripartite diary entry, “America Needs a Miracle,” New York Intelligencer:

And maybe it’s a good moment to see where we are. A man quotes Shakespeare comparing “man, proud man” with “an angry ape.” Any literate person can see that Shakespeare is not talking about race at all; he’s talking (rather presciently) about human beings’ deeper, more primal natures that can obscure our rational thought. But Shapland instantly thought he was being attacked for being black. The distortion and poisoning of the mind here is quite something to behold. And mourn.

Because this passage in an article on how cause and effect might be subject to superposition doesn’t make sense to me:

In 2019, [Caslav Brukner at the University of Vienna, Austria] published a paper that took this idea a step further. He wanted to build a picture of causality that reflected the full complexity of the world, merging the notions of temporal superposition from quantum mechanics with general relativity’s prediction that time seems to pass more slowly in stronger gravitational fields. His thought experiment imagines a scenario in which two spaceships – operated by sworn enemies we shall call Alice and Bob – synchronise clocks before readying their photon cannons to fire. Then, at precisely 1200, each of them fires a photon at the other’s ship. But there is a plot twist: Bob’s spacecraft is docked near a dense planet. According to general relativity, objects such as this with strong gravitational fields would cause nearby clocks to slow. So, time should run slower for Bob, and he would get Alice’s photon before his clock shows 1200.

So far, so classical. But, Brukner asks, what if you could put that massive planet into a quantum superposition state, so that it is close to both Alice and Bob, and affects both of their clocks? In that scenario, the impossible seems to happen: a superposition state is created where Alice’s photon arrives at Bob’s spaceship before he sends his, but Bob’s photon also reaches Alice before she sends hers. [“In the quantum realm, cause doesn’t necessarily come before effect,” Kelly Oakes, NewScientist (18 January 2020, paywall)]

Or would they? Wouldn’t both photons slow down? They’re traveling the same path, albeit in opposite directions.

Down at the quantum level, things are so bizarre – allegedly – that they feel like a hack, a kludge, not something natural.

Trypophobia:

A psychiatrist said that Amanda (not her real name) had trypophobia. There isn’t much in the medical textbooks about this condition, but you can find lots of information online about how it is a fear of holes. You can follow links to pictures of sponges and the perforated heads of flowers that claim to test and diagnose you. But like much information on the web, descriptions of the condition are misleading. Trypophobia isn’t really down to holes. Or fear. It might not even be a phobia, because new research suggests it is triggered by disgust. Less fear and more loathing. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but some researchers believe we will see an uptick in cases. [“Trypophobia: Why a fear of holes is real – and may be on the rise,” David Adam, NewScientist (18 January 2020, paywall)]

When it comes to the evangelicals and President Trump, not all are pleased to endorse and vote for him. Daniel Deitrich in South Bend, IN, is a worship leader and a musician:

A man self-aware enough to ask how his fellow Evangelicals can possibly endorse a man such as Trump. Shane Claiborne of Religion News Service interviews Deitrich:

What do you think is the purpose of worship music?

There’s this great line from a prayer in the old Church of God hymnal that says, “We thank you for music, and for everything that elevates our spirits above the smoggy confusions of our time and gives us hope.” I love that. I’m stuck in the smoggy confusion a lot. Worship music should give us hope — hope that the way of Jesus can bring healing and peace to a hurting world here and now.

Worship music teaches and shapes us, so what we sing about really matters. There are a ton of great songs that help us praise and thank God, but worship music should also help us lament, reflect, confess, celebrate, challenge and push us outside the walls of the church to be the hands and feet of Christ.

… elevates our spirits above the smoggy confusions of our time … I just have to love that line. It’s an admission that anyone can be wrong, that it’s not about emotion, but rationality, even if it’s only to interpret the Bible, rather than forcing emotional reactions on the Bible.

Oh, yes, I’m still an agnostic. I take wisdom where I find it.

I wonder how long it’ll take for him to be bodily ejected from the Evangelical movement – and how many Evangelicals will be brave enough to listen and think for themselves.

I wonder how many other puns I missed.

If you desire to watch Discarded Lovers (1932), you may need to sit down and really concentrate on the first fifteen minutes of this whodunit, because it comes off a little flat. Irma Gladden, beautiful movie star, has been leaving a trail of men behind her: husbands, ex-husbands, lovers, wannabe lovers. She’s the sort who inspires the most devoted family man to lust more than a little in his heart. Supposedly. The quality of the print, and Irma’s manner, did little to nothing for me. And the chauffeur’s in the mix for stealing and pawning one of her jewels, just to satisfy that diversity requirement.

So when Irma is found dead in her car, a lot of people go into shock: former husband, current husband, current secretary, random reporter who’s been hanging around the set to chat with the scriptwriter. Heck, even the scriptwriter’s a little woozy, working on the movie she’s just wrapped up, had to write her dialog just moments before she’d say it – perhaps he wrote it badly in the first place so he could be on set with her, no?

I’ll be dead soon enough. That’s what happens in the movie, at least. Gotta talk to that scriptwriter about that.

Once Irma’s dead, though, the movie accelerates, even if it does have the unfortunate burden of the classic over-confident, incompetent cop hanging around its neck for far too long. The murderer is clever, hiding behind curtains, attempting to silence the secretary, and even knocking off one of the other suspects who claims he knows the identity of the killer, but -ahem- won’t say it over the phone. Sheesh.

In the big windup, we get to see the climactic seen of the movie Irma was making, and it has the classic effect – it turns the killer into a big ol’ blabbermouth. Which is not entirely unbelievable, since this was a crime of passion, not of business, and someone was just bursting to boast about having put her out of his misery.

Throw in a romantic subplot and a useless police chief, and this is a mediocre specimen of the genre. Less than an hour long, you won’t feel like you’ve gone through two or three of your own lives watching it. But you may wish the print could be cleaned up.

Another way to watch your life drain away on the datafeed of a smartphone:

Since April 2019, there have been more than 300 cases in the UK of attacks in which people try to fraudulently obtain codes that would let them gain control of someone’s mobile number, the UK’s data watchdog has revealed in figures that suggest the practice is becoming more common.

The process of SIM-jacking, or SIM-swapping, involves an attacker contacting a person’s mobile network operator and fraudulently obtaining a porting authorisation code (PAC) enabling them to switch the victim’s phone number to another phone on a different network.

UK-based food-writer Jack Monroe recently had about £5000 stolen from her bank account after someone managed to hijack her mobile number. [NewScientist (11 January 2020)]

And the worst thing about it? There’s almost nothing you can do about it! It’s all about the mistake someone makes at your carrier!

Another reason to view using your phone as your critical interface to the world with some a lot of suspicion.

A couple of weeks ago Andrew Sullivan mentioned a sociological observation that I’d never heard of before, found in the first part of his weekly tripartite diary:

But a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines. In a fascinating experiment, participants were provided with a chart containing a thousand dots that ranged along a spectrum from very blue to very purple and were asked to go through and identify all the blue dots. The study group was then broken in two. One subgroup was shown a new chart with the same balance of purple and blue dots as the first one and asked to repeat the task. Not surprisingly, they generally found the same number of blue dots as they did on the first chart. A second subgroup was shown a new chart with fewer blue dots and more purple dots. In this group, participants started marking dots as blue that they had marked as purple on the first chart. “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”

We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context. As part of the study, the psychologists ran another experiment showing participants a range of threatening and nonthreatening faces and asking them to identify which was which. Next, participants were split into two groups and asked to repeat the exercise. The first subgroup was shown the same ratio of threatening and nonthreatening faces as in the initial round; subgroup two was shown many fewer threatening faces. Sure enough, the second group adjusted by seeing faces they once thought of as nonthreatening as threatening.

If the rhetoric coming from your favorite group seems to be pathological, despite visible and substantial progress in tolerance, this may explain the attitude. From the study Sullivan is pulling this from:

Our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.

This may tie in with Dr. Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now, which I have not read more than reviews, which suggests he delineates how various measures of violence and poverty indicate that progress is being made with many global problems. I do not know how he treats them, but it may be worth the time of someone who has the time to read the book as a way to discover if the reader is a victim of this syndrome.

And it’s always worth remembering that newspapers media sites gain audience through covering disasters, not so much successes.

For all that, without having read Sullivan’s current diary entry, just from its title, America Needs a Miracle, I have to wonder if he’s suffering from the same syndrome – or if his Ph.D. in Political Science gives him a pass. I hope so, for my own assessment of American politics, in combination with Professor Turchin’s examination of demographics, is certainly grim enough. Oh, I hope I’m wrong for humanity’s sake, but for my own self-assessment I cannot help but hope to be right.

Weir:

A structure, used to dam up a stream or river, over which the water flows, is called a weir. The conditions of flow, in the case of a weir, are practically the same as those of a rectangular notch. That is why, a notch is, sometimes, called as a weir and vice versa.

The only difference between a notch and a weir is that the notch of a small size and the weir is of a bigger one. Moreover, a notch is usually made in a plate, whereas a notch is made of masonry or concrete. [CodeCogs]

Remember Lev Parnas? He continues to be an interesting figure in the Trump orbit, even though much of what he’s said remains unverified, at least in my limited understanding of the situation.

And now his lawyer has contacted Senator McConnell, the guy who’s making decisions regarding the trial, via a letter that suggests Parnas has a lot to say concerning the President. Here’s a single paragraph of this three page letter:

Mr. Parnas would explain the conversation he overheard between Mr. Giuliani and then-Energy Department Secretary Rick Perry, who attended the inauguration in lieu of Vice President Pence, and the quid pro quo that Mr. Perry conveyed while there. Mr. Parnas would testify to the meeting he attended between Mr. Giuliani and the special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, at which Mr. Volker asked Mr. Giuliani  to help facilitate a call and a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky and Trump. Mr. Parnas would explain that Mr. Volker connected Mr. Giuliani with Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Ukrainian Official Andrey Yermak, to try to facilitate a call and face-to-face meeting between Trump and Zelensky. [Transcribed, any typos mine.]

Which raises two questions:

1. What does McConnell care about Parnas? He’s already ignored the 75% of Americans who want witnesses.
2. And how trustworthy is Parnas? Has any of his other information been independently confirmed or disputed?

This all feels like an orchestrated drama, but I cannot make out who is pulling on the strings. Could it be Trump? Putin? Some slightly insane insanely rich dude? A Ukrainian mafia?

Or is this guy on the level?

I was watching last night’s The Late Show as Colbert interviewed Michael Stipe, and I just started laughing when Stipe mentioned Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenaged environmental activist cum United Nations shamer, turning her autism into her superpower.

Not at Thunberg.

But what would be Donald J. Trump’s superpower?

Being a douchebag.

Just doesn’t have the same cachet, does it?

I see CNN is reporting that there will be no witnesses & evidence presented at the impeachment trial, and Trump’s acquittal – dubious, in my view – is inevitable.

One of the pivotal Senators of whom I was unaware is Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN). Steve Benen describes him as an institutionalist with a variety of posts under his belt, and is retiring at age 80 with little to fear from Trump, politically speaking. Still …

As Alexander sees it, Trump did what he’s accused of doing. Indeed, while the president continues to describe his antics as “perfect” and “beautiful,” the Tennessee Republican conceded that Trump’s actions were “inappropriate” and that the House impeachment managers successfully proved their case.

Alexander just doesn’t much care. He read the call summary, heard the arguments, weighed the evidence, and concluded that Trump is guilty – of an offensive that isn’t especially important. It’s why, in the senator’s mind, there’s no need for any kind of accountability. …

And his conscience led him to disregard the misdeeds of a president whose guilt he considers obvious. Alexander not only won’t vote to convict Trump and remove him from office, he believes the right course of action is to make this the first impeachment trial in American history in which the Senate doesn’t even hear from witnesses.

Thing is, Benen shouldn’t be surprised at Alexander’s poor judgment. After all, it was Senator Alexander, possibly exhibiting signs of dementia, who said

“Better to get your news directly from the president,” Smith said. “In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” [Vox]

Which all leads me to formulate a reporter’s question:

Senator Alexander, in view of the indisputable fact that the Senate, and therefore Congress, has now ceded to the Executive yet another power assigned to it by the Constitution, is there any point in having a Congress? And how do you think this will look in your legacy?

That’s just off the cuff. I’m sure readers can come up with more insightful questions for the good Senator.

Pushing Congress towards the Museum Of Useless Relics.

And that’s not to say I have lost faith in Speaker Pelosi planning to use this outcome to win the Senate and the Presidency in November. But this is a precedent, and I can only hope the next President repudiates it.

Another bad hair day, Franky. How are you gonna pick up chicks looking like this?

Very briefly, because it hurts my brain, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) spins the tale of a cyborg spaceship pilot named Frank, who is being used, under the cover of being human, as the pilot of an experimental spaceship. On his first flight, however, an alien spaceship destroys the ship, and Frank escapes by using a parachute. The aliens track him down and blast him, but not being biological, he’s only damaged, and, after killing a few locals, he finds a cave to hide in.

You see, your Highness, if we spring a leak, we’ll die and they’ll survive, thus depriving them of our demonic presence! Or is it “presences”? LINE, dammit!

Its scientist-creators and their general are looking for him, but the aliens, meantime, are engaged in the traditional alien invader past time of kidnapping Earth women for use as cattle in order to rejuvenate the alien race, which has basically blasted itself into near-extinction in an internecine nuclear war. As the harvest continues, various Earth men get in the way and are blasted into little pieces. They didn’t seem too bright, so I wasn’t all broken up over them or anything. Maybe I giggled a bit, I don’t remember. See? The drugs are working.

One of scientists gets caught in the roundup and actually has the temerity to fight back and not be totally compliant in every possible way, especially when the alien Princess demands to know just what the hell the device used for tracking Frank is for. For that rebellion, she’s imprisoned in a cage, just out of range of the long, pointy claws of the similarly imprisoned …

Space Monster!

Spock’s older brother, Big Hand. He never made it out of Vulcan kindergarten, sad to say, and his parents never spoke of him.

Doesn’t that fill you with feelings of wellness? Not to draw this out, word gets to the American military of the presence of a spaceship, they presume alien intentions are bad intentions and launch ineffective rockets at it, while Frank, led to the spaceship by the other scientist, is dragged in, breaks free, gets all the surviving prisoners out, and, as the spaceship is leaving, shoots the Princess and her evil minion, a guy made up to look like a young Uncle Fester from The Addams Family and who left his toothmarks all over the bloody scenery. And Frank has a wrestling match with the …

Space Monster!

Yeah. No. No. No. The cinematography was nice. The bikinis were skimpy. They did OK with the stock footage of actual rocket launches. The Space Monster was almost well-managed in my perennial ode to Burke’s idea of the sublime: we never see the Space Monster in its entirety, just semi-horrifying, semi-silly hints. But the Evil Minion was really creepy. And didn’t have Uncle Fester’s essential innocence. The rest of the acting was dull. The plot sucked rocks. Maybe they were trying to play it for laughs. After all, the evil minion / young Uncle Fester is named Dr. Nadir.

Give this one a skip.

As the uproar over Alan Dershowitz’s defense of the President’s behavior gets louder, I keep thinking we need to get back to basics. I mean, this commentary has one obvious flaw, but a hidden one as well:

“He argued that if the president shot someone in the public square but believed it was in the public interest, it wouldn’t be an impeachable offense,” said J.W. Verret, a law professor at George Mason University. “But dictators always believe that what they are doing is in the best interest of the public — that’s the essence of an autocracy.” [WaPo]

The obvious, if minor, flaw, is that not all dictators are motivated by love of country. Hell, I’d say most are not. There is certainly room to believe that there’s a non-zero subset who simply love power and what it can do for them. Verret’s implication that all politicians do what they do out of love of country is naive.

But by following Trump’s, and by implication Dershowitz’s, claim that he could get away with shooting someone in the public square and get away with it, Verret misses the truly key problem with the argument, an appeal to one of the most fundamental keystones of the Republic:

Everyone is equal before the law.

Trump takes an action which is forbidden. If it’s granted that he can do it, then so can everybody else, otherwise, our keystone is upset and the entire structure, already trembling in the face of the corruption of the Republicans, comes tumbling down, soon enough to our woe.

Sure, we give out special passes. We permit self-defense claims in court in the case of homicide, allowing the jury to decide if a killing is justified or not. But there is no special Fog of Immunity for the President, regardless of party, even delayed prosecution, because, to delay justice is to deny justice.

For those readers who agree with Justice Kavanaugh, who would have us believe that the President should be able to delay prosecutions of themselves because they’re too busy and important, let me remind those readers that this is one of the contingencies for which Vice-Presidents should be ready.

In the end, we need to get back to basics, not be distracted by the handwaving, and if Trump is to be excused because of good intentions, so should everyone else. Just tell us your killing of your neighbor was because it would be good for the nation.

Or just admit the Dershowitz argument is just a load of crap and move on. Unless, of course, this is a setup.